The Current

On Fox News, Ambivalence About Roy Moore

The tone of MSNBC’s coverage of the Senate election in Alabama on Tuesday has been tense and expectant. In the morning, Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough broadcast their show live from Birmingham, where they conducted an attention-grabbing interview with a former staffer for Jeff Sessions, who said that she would be voting for the Democratic candidate, Doug Jones. On Fox News, things were more muted. “Up on a high horse,” the host Neil Cavuto muttered at one point today, as the screen showed footage of Roy Moore climbing into the saddle of the horse he rode to his polling place. There was other news to get to—a press conference about the Port Authority terrorist, the rolling reaction to the President’s angry Twitter attack on the New York Democratic senator Kirsten Gillibrand—and, when the coverage shifted back to Alabama, the air was joyless. The dour South Dakota senator John Thune appeared and said that, should Moore win, it was “inevitable” that the Senate would conduct an investigation into the allegations of his past misconduct with teen-age girls. In the studio, Cavuto, square-headed and froggy-voiced, was already contemplating a loss and whether it might imperil the Republican tax plan and the other Republican agenda items that are supposed to come after it. “I wonder if it’s a one-and-done deal if it does flip to the Democrats,” he mused.

All this probably says less about the actual state of the race than it does about how isolated Moore has become. Moore likes to denounce the Washington establishment, which he says is opposed to his candidacy, but nearly everyone in his party—save for Donald Trump himself—has spoken against him. Jeff Sessions, who until he became Attorney General had been the most conservative member of the Senate, has said that he believes Moore’s accusers. Richard Shelby, Alabama’s conservative and somewhat retiring current senator, willed himself onto television this weekend to say that he would not be voting for Moore and that the Republican Party could “do better.” The libertarian senator Jeff Flake, of Arizona, tweeted a photograph of a check that he was sending to Jones; Mitt Romney said that he could not support Moore. Mike Pence has been silent. Laura Ingraham tweeted, “Riding to the polls on a horse is really stupid.”

Monday night in Midland City, Alabama, Steve Bannon, who is backing Moore and who has promised an all-out war on the Republican establishment, assembled the surrogates that he could for a pro-Moore rally. They were fringe figures: the former Milwaukee sheriff David Clarke; the right-wing Texas congressman Louie Gohmert; Paul Nehlen, a conservative political gadfly from House Speaker Paul Ryan’s congressional district, who has spoken on white-supremacist radio. The hype around Bannon often suggests that his position on the fringe is a sign of strength—that it frees him to say impolitic things—but, in Midland City, as Moore and his surrogates competed to say ever-crazier things, it was easy to see the weakness in designing a movement that runs through Roy Moore. For today, at least, he and Moore seemed to have lost Fox News. “I've been pretty hard on Moore, but I’ve changed my mind—did you hear that his lawyer is Jewish?” Greg Gutfeld said, sarcastically, around five o’clock. “If his horse groomer is black and his vest tailor is gay, I'll vote for him.” Everyone laughed.